on East Fourth Street near Phebe’s I took a class in 16mm filmmaking, down in a cluttered basement, disorganized, mismatched tables and chairs, smells of darkroom chemicals, machine oil and the summer sweat of my fellow pupils, the satisfaction I found in splicing film, the aluminum splicing block, the razor, the tape, willing my fingers to create clean cuts, I’d grab discarded lengths of film stock left from previous classes, bits of film hanging on little hooks or piled in plastic containers, hold them up to the light and find reasons for them to join together, not logical, narrative reasons but a base reading of light and dark, movement joining movement, or I’d scratch and draw directly on the film creating my own continuum of visuals, the end result making little sense, sense and significance were alien to my nature back then, the instructor didn’t seem to care what we did, he was a slovenly middle aged lifetime bachelor, a stranger to personal hygiene, uncombed, stringy hair and always the same dirty clothes, the giveaway that he never changed was the ink stain on the back right trouser pocket, his instructions were either technically specific or frustratingly obtuse, sometimes both in one sentence, I thought I understood him but by the end of a sentence I understood nothing, he’d veer from the topic of filmmaking and start in on politics, philosophy and history, with an emphasis on observation, close observation, walking after class with him one evening I tried to engage him in cinematic discourse, Eisenstein’s film sense, Murnau’s subjectivity, but kept losing the thread as he frequently stopped to minutely observe what was happening on the street, he would go up to strangers and ask questions, I usually walk with head down, not making eye contact with potential street crazies, potential violent people, and fast, I was the fastest walker, always noting the easiest, quickest path forward, but accompanying my instructor from the East Village zigzagging west and north toward Chelsea was a slow jaunt with many sudden stops, he would stop motionless in the middle of the sidewalk or street because maybe there was something to look at, something to hear, particular attention paid to a cop leaning against a cop car, the guy handing out flyers, the people just standing around, not going anywhere, anything happening on the street was worthy of observation, that too was an understanding, anything can be deemed worthy of attention in some way, positive or negative, interesting or not, it satisfied an internal need to categorize, to gain sense, to mark time, to live a distracted life, less attention on one’s self, one’s appearance, one’s thirst, and instead focus on without, within takes care of itself, the body generally takes care of itself, the eyes and ears need their stimulation, they’re open all day, might as well feed them, take a snapshot, a recording, record an impression, the city streets are always eager to oblige, Musil’s domain of men on an adventure who have gone astray, for me it were the ears that found stimulation, just around the corner from my apartment was a construction site, it had been a corner parking lot, a cutthrough path for me on my walks, but was then transformed to a combination of rubble, men and steel, I lingered often at the site, the sun high and distinct radiating its intensity over prewar brick buildings not tall enough to offer shaded relief, a chain link fence kept the curious at a distance and the thieves from stealing, the beginnings of a kid’s erector set come to life, the sounds of metal on metal from the workers on the steel beams, metal on rock from the workers on the ground, some wielded hand tools, some pickaxes and the best of all, sonically speaking were the hardhatted men wearing oversize canvas gloves wrestling the jackhammers, pneumatic jackhammers like the Barco, the American Pneumatic, the Chicago Pneumatic, strong men with tools so effectively powerful as to be nearly unmanageable, the noise they made was exquisite, impossible to ignore, bursts of rhythm, not just the ears but the whole body was engaged in percussive appreciation, the focus may have been on breaking up rock but I am certain the operators fell under the sway of the music they were creating, perhaps unconsciously altering their attacks on the ground to achieve symphonic perfection, like Steve Reich in tandem with Gene Palma, syncopated cacophony that made anything possible, the syncopation only evident when one listened hard and deep and sought out the odd aural connections, the call and response between rivet peening and breaking up stone, the jagged, percussive whacks from every kind of hammer, sledge, club, claw and ball peen, their respective ascending tones, the clanging of multiple adjacent frequencies, and in a separate sound wave swath, the elongated hissing of steam releasing, vapored sibilance, and separate again, the grunts, sighs and murmurous unintelligible conversational bits that are always present where humans abound, an attenuated perpetual spew, noise remaking itself inside of noise, and I a hearing witness, transformed and made anew, the tympanic membrane repeatedly struck, the vibrations transmitted through Malleus, Incus and Stapes to the cochlea and finally making its presence felt in the brain, to be recalled again and again whenever the body required a pacing rhythm, memory being what it is, these rhythms are continually altered depending on the immediate temporality, the input of senses, the mind’s need to create and reassess what it knows, I closed my eyes so as not to be influenced by the theatricality of the scene, the dance of stocky figures, the costumed performers, all clinging dust and dirt, I became dizzy, a euphoric type of dizziness, with blackened vision and sharpened hearing, an isolation of the senses as one would expect in an out of body experience, I fell into a syncopic state, breathing, heart rate, blood flow all calibrated to the erective rat-a-tat of the construction site

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Michael L Sevy has been published in 3:AM Magazine. In the 1980s he was the leader of punk bands Cold Dogs in the Courtyard and Bonus Marchers. Michael lives in Vermont. Twitter: @MichaelSevy Bluesky: @mlsevy.bsky.social